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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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Republican Mike Rogers is the Senate candidate Democrats need to save their party
Many progressive Michiganders – especially in the Jewish community – will hold their nose and vote for Democratic Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed despite his association, friendship and political partnership with antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker.
Many will hold their nose because El-Sayed has called Israel a “rogue” state, refusing to recognize the Jewish State of Israel as legitimate.
They will hold their nose and vote for El-Sayed because they are more scared of the Republicans’ hold on the Senate than a tainted Democrat.
However, as a social progressive who almost always votes Democrat, I want to push back against this logic and urge my fellow Michigan Democrats and progressives to vote for Republican candidate Mike Rogers for the sake of progressive, democratic values.
For me, the disdain that El-Sayed has shown for the Jewish community, especially in his continuing refusal to disavow his relationship with Piker, puts him in the same category as candidates who are openly racist and homophobic. Even the most loyal progressive would reject a racist, even if that meant risking a Republican Senate.
To show the Democrats that such candidates should never be nominated, we must show them that such candidates can never win. Such a candidate winning would be a disaster for the most fundamental requirements we have for any candidate of any party.
Instead, those who really want to focus on turning the Senate Democratic should slip across Michigan’s border to Ohio to knock on doors for Sherrod Brown or donate to help James Talarico in Texas. Those efforts would be a real show of Democratic and progressive solidarity – much more than a vote for El-Sayed.
Donald Trump and the Republican party would like nothing more than to see Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate – an easy target to paint all progressives, liberals and loyal Democrats with the brush of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The anti-Israel and antisemitic words of El-Sayed and other extremists in the party are a poison that has the potential to severely damage the party long term and make it unviable both for Jews and all those with traditional liberal values. Only a decisive win for Rogers will send a clear message to the Democrats that a return to a stance that is both pro-Israel and pro Palestinian, respecting the Jewish community, is the only way for a strong party to stand up to the Republicans in national elections to defend our progressive values.
This election is not just about the safety and future of Jews in the Democratic party. It is also about returning America to a place where we do not tolerate the harassment of people with whom we politically disagree. The harassment and intimidation of any candidate considered pro-Israel at the Michigan Democratic convention in April traumatized many Jewish participants. Michigan’s Jewish Attorney General Dana Nessel skipped the convention on Saturday out of fear for her safety.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed has said nothing to apologize for his supporters who carried out this gross infraction of the democratic process. Imagine what the National Democratic Convention will look like in less than two years if this model of behavior is not denounced now. Jews with traditional pro-Israel values will see they have no place in the Democratic party.The only way to stop this behavior is to show that it leads to Democrats losing elections.
In recent days, El-Sayed reportedly apologized for remarks he made in March after a truck loaded with explosives rammed into Temple Israel in suburban Detroit with a driver intent on shooting whomever he didn’t blow up. There were more than 100 children inside.
Jews were shocked when El-Sayed seemed to justify the near murder with the words “hurt people hurt people.” His recent non-apology apology if anyone was hurt by his words made it worse.
He doubled down on recognizing the “context” for the attempted massacre: Israel’s actions in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah – the terror group in which the Michigan terrorist’s brother was a member when he died.
In other words, according to El-Sayed, if children are blown up in Michigan, you can blame Israel.
Moreover, he continues to blame Israel for Michigan not having enough funds for its public schools and other needs, a classic antisemitic deflection. His antisemitic blood libel continued after his primary victory when he accused Israel – not just its government – of being “bloodthirsty” – in its defensive war against Hamas.
El-Sayed’s friend and campaign partner Hasan Piker has shared the same sentiment ,warning pro-Israel American Jews that if they continue to defend Israel, they will be targeted because of that stance.
I urge my fellow progressives to examine Piker’s comments insulting Poles and Poland, blaming the West for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his disdain for Black chatterers on his show – with the vilest of expressions. How can they vote for a candidate who befriends such a man and repeatedly invites him to campaign events?
Yes, Mike Rogers is an old-fashioned conservative who has had to cede some ground to Donald Trump’s conspiratorial views of the 2020 election. But I would argue that worse for our democracy is to normalize the cesspool of disgusting swearing and demonization that Piker champions.
Progressive Democrats must never give up the fight for our causes. However, in the long run, we must right the sinking ship of the Democratic party, a party which is our only hope for winning the war for our progressive values. The path to making this necessary correction is turning our energies to making sure that Mike Rogers defeats Abdul El-Sayed. That is why Rogers, a Republican, has my vote and my voice.
The post Republican Mike Rogers is the Senate candidate Democrats need to save their party appeared first on The Forward.
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Randy Fine denounces ‘rise of Islam in America’ in address to Republican Jewish confab
(JTA) — LAS VEGAS — Jewish far-right firebrand Randy Fine attacked Muslim politicians in the Democratic party as he addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit on Sunday night.
There were many denouncements of democratic socialist politicians at the gathering’s gala dinner, but the Florida congressman’s criticism was the most pointed as he addressed, what he said was “the elephant in the room: the rise of Islam in America.”
“We are constantly told that the problem is not mainstream Islam, but radical Islamism. But where are the so-called moderate Muslims in our political system?” Fine said to applause.
Fine, who won his recent Florida primary with endorsements from the RJC, President Donald Trump and the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, has prompted considerable ire on Capitol Hill for comments denigrating Muslims — including comparing them to dogs — and saying that Gazans should “starve away” until the Israeli hostages were released.
Fine was one of a few speakers who blasted progressive figures such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and the streamer Hasan Piker, as they spoke to an audience of mostly RJC members and students, who were seated in a ballroom inside Las Vegas’ Venetian Resort.
Most speakers criticized socialists who they say are taking over the Democratic Party, and emphasized the need for Republicans to maintain control of the House and Senate in November. Fine said he was intentionally pointing to a list of Muslim figures.
“The fact that not all Muslims are bad does not mean that no Muslims are bad,” Fine told reporters after the program on Sunday. “People are unwilling to have that discussion, and if we don’t have it we’re going to have real problems in this country.”
The other speaker on Sunday who seemed willing to have the discussion was Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, who said Islam is “fundamentally incompatible with our way of life” and decried the “Islamization of Texas.”
“If we want to fight antisemitism, we need to start with our immigration policy,” said Gill. He added that “importing people whose values are incompatible with our own” would make the U.S. weaker.
Fine commended Gill after the event for his comments about Islam while others were “afraid to talk about it.”
“I give him credit,” Fine said.
Fine’s comments came just weeks after an ugly primary battle against anti-Israel influencer and former celebrity poker player Dan Bilzerian, who has said he wants to “kill Israelis” and believes the Holocaust death toll was exaggerated. Fine made headlines with inflammatory comments about Armenians (Bilzerian is Armenian-American) in addition to his rhetoric on Muslims.
About an hour before he spoke, Fine tweeted a recent video of Gov. Kathy Hochul wearing a hijab while visiting a mosque, adding the caption, “This is what surrendering to Mainstream Islam looks like.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Randy Fine denounces ‘rise of Islam in America’ in address to Republican Jewish confab appeared first on The Forward.
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‘All of us have to bring down violence wherever we see it,’ El-Sayed says following address to Jewish Democrats
(JTA) — BIRMINGHAM – Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said he wished he could retract his past comments regarding a synagogue attack, speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency minutes after he issued his second apology in as many days to the Jewish community in the Wolverine State.
“If I had the opportunity to take it back, I would take it all the way back,” he said.
“There is never a justification for a terrorist act, period,” El-Sayed added. “What I was trying to say is that there is a broader question of the responsibility I think all of us have to bring down violence wherever we see it and however we see it.”
He added, “I understand and heard that people felt like it was justifying the attack, and I didn’t intend to justify it.”
El-Sayed addressed around 300 Michigan Jewish Democrats at the caucus’s annual “Summer Simcha” fundraiser in suburban Detroit on Sunday, one day after he spoke to the caucus at the state Democratic nominating convention. At both events, he sought forgiveness for his earlier comments that had linked the March attack at Temple Israel, in West Bloomfield Township, to Israel’s war in Lebanon.
In his Sunday speech he referenced the Jewish “value of tikkun olam, to repair the world,” and he affirmed the synagogue preschool had been “attacked by a terrorist.” To the gathered Jewish Democrats, the candidate added he hoped to “earn your trust.”
His outreach to Jewish voters will soon become even more pronounced. The campaign intends to hire a Jewish liaison and is in the midst of an interview process for the role, which includes talking with Jewish community leaders, a person familiar with the campaign told JTA.
With El-Sayed’s narrow primary victory, and Michigan’s increasing centrality in the fight for control of the Senate, the state’s approximately 100,000 Jewish voters — the majority of whom have historically voted Democrat — find themselves under the microscope as they weigh voting for a candidate who supports zeroing out all aid to Israel. Following his Summer Simcha speech, El-Sayed stayed to speak with a long line of Jews who came up to share their concerns.
Asked later what he’s heard from the Jews who speak to him, he told JTA, “I hear a lot about safety, and folks want to know that they’re going to be safe.”
He added, “The prerequisite of Jewish safety is never in question to me, and I just want to make that very, very clear.”
The event, at which JTA was the only media outlet given permission to attend, underscored the tension that has become increasingly difficult for Jewish Democrats, in Michigan and beyond, to reconcile: whether party candidates have earned the vote of their Jewish constituents when those candidates won’t commit to supporting Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, or haven’t taken what community members feel is a strong enough stance against antisemitism.
El-Sayed’s Jewish liaison will likely have their work cut out for them. In both of his spoken apologies this weekend, the candidate had insisted the main problem was with the timing of his attempt to apply “context” to the situation, not with the substance of what he said. Yet many Jews then and now objected to the idea that bringing up Israel’s war in Lebanon was appropriate context when discussing a synagogue attack.
Rabbi Paul Yedwab, a member of Temple Israel’s clergy who was not in attendance at the event, declined to comment to JTA on El-Sayed’s apologies, citing the synagogue board’s recent reaffirmation of a federal law prohibiting houses of worship from commenting on electoral politics.
Asked about which “context” he had been referring to in his apologies, El-Sayed told JTA he meant “violence in all of its forms, in all circumstances.”
El-Sayed shared the room with some party figures who have sharply opposed him, and who the state’s Jewish Democrats hold in high esteem. The caucus event honored state Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and who has had public disagreements with El-Sayed over his handling of Jewish communal issues.
In her own speech, Nessel acknowledged that Jews were being forced into a “stark choice” thanks to “members of our own party who seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and place the Jewish diaspora in jeopardy.”
Yet the attorney general stressed that the election was bigger than Israel, and, invoking Purim’s Queen Esther, urged Jewish voters to put their own feelings of personal safety aside.
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” she told the crowd.
Nessel said that other societal concerns – climate change, artificial intelligence, the threat of nuclear warfare – loom larger than support for Israel alone and would worsen under continued GOP rule. “What is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist, if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?” she asked.
“I think it’s so easy for people to lash out at what they perceive are direct attacks on their faith, on their cultural beliefs, on their historical ancestry,” Nessel told JTA following her speech. “It’s very easy for people to be mad and to say, ‘I reject that.’ I just hope that people will consider that there are many other factors at play.”
Even among caucus leadership, though, there were deep divisions over the right Jewish approach to take in the election.
“I’m a Mike Rogers supporter,” Troy Zukowski-Serlin, a Kalamazoo-based member of the Michigan Jewish Democrats board, told JTA on Sunday before El-Sayed’s speech. Despite his board position, Zukowski-Serlin said nothing would change his mind about voting for the Republican candidate: “It’s signed, sealed and delivered with me.”
His wife Michelle, who attended the event wearing a dress with an Israeli flag imprint, said she would be writing in Nessel, “my hero,” on the ballot.
Jewish Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is running for Congress in a heavily Jewish suburban Detroit district and whose own disagreements with El-Sayed have spilled into public view, told JTA that the event was “a step in the right direction” for the candidate.
“It has lingered in the Jewish community for the last six months,” Moss said, of El-Sayed’s initial comments about the Temple Israel attack in his district. “And I appreciate that this is something that he recognized there needed to be a reckoning with, and amends toward.”
Some Jewish communal leaders in attendance, though, said he wasn’t there yet.
“He is moving, and I’m hopeful about that. And it’s making me feel more secure in his leadership,” Rabbi Josh Whinston of Temple Beth Emeth, a Reform synagogue in Ann Arbor, told JTA. “There’s still work to do.”
Whinston said he would also like to see El-Sayed address other comments he has made, including having referred to the Israeli government as “bloodthirsty.” Such language, the rabbi said, “puts us in harm’s way.”
The event’s organizers were also skeptical that El-Sayed had changed many minds.
“I think that people are pretty well set in what they want to do,” Joan Lowenstein, another caucus board member, told JTA. “But I think they still want to hear words that make them feel that someone else is thinking about what they’re concerned about.”
Liz Fried, of Ann Arbor, was one of the attendees who went up to speak to El-Sayed afterwards. She told him that her children were soon to fly to Israel, and asked if he would support funding for the Iron Dome defensive system.
He wouldn’t, she recalled to JTA — a position he has held in public.
“I was upset,” Fried said. “He doesn’t care about the safety of my children.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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